Every single organisation in the world has to manage payments. Regardless of size, location, or volume, you must create a payment journey for your customers. The challenge is building a payments architecture capable of handling volumes while you scale and allowing for multiple payment methods to fit user expectations.
The clue is in the name – payment gateway architecture. You need to architect your payment system to retain critical data within agile storage while ensuring that every transaction is accurate and downtime is minimal.
A payment gateway architecture is a payment design that allows you to collect customer payments using various payment methods. That’s how simple (and how complicated) it is. You use it to collect money from credit cards, debit cards, and bank accounts and transport your customers from the point of purchase to the final transfer of funds.
Your payment gateway architecture has to be PCI compliant, aligned with the most recent anti-fraud legislation, reliable, robust, secure, agile, flexible, and accessible. It must also be easy to use – your customers want to click and go, not click, wait, try again, wait and maybe then go. It also has to offer multiple payment methods to align with the users’ need to be able to use whichever payment method they prefer.
There are four main steps carried out by a payment processing architecture:
Step 1: Request payment from your customer with a personalised payment link from multiple payment methods.
Step 2: Receive payment from whichever method your customer prefers through a trusted payment gateway architecture that follows the process below to authenticate and collect the funds.
Step 3: Your payment gateway collects the information from your customer, encrypts it, and sends it to the acquiring bank. The bank receives the encoded data, decodes it, and sends the payment information request to the relevant payment authority for authorisation. If the transaction is approved, the issuing bank (the bank that belongs to the customer) then sends a message to the payment gateway to confirm that the payment was a success or if it was declined.
Step 4: Record payments with no effort, automate payment admin and generate a paid invoice instantly.
You need to overcome several challenges when architecting payments for your platform. The most important is creating an accurate and seamless payment process that can grow with your platform. Customers don’t appreciate incorrect charges or overly complicated payment systems. These issues will make most customers choose another company instead of yours – experiences are critical to retaining customers and building loyalty, and the payment experience is one of the most important.
In addition to ensuring that your payment gateway architecture is smooth and accurate, you also need to ensure that your system is capable of handling four pivotal challenges:
Your data needs to be stored in a secure environment that’s accessible on demand for audits, regulatory requirements, customer disputes, refunds and returns. While the payment takes only a few seconds, the information generated by that payment is essential to running your business. You need to retain the data, ensure the integrity of the data, and store the data over the long term in a reliable, robust and secure system.
Your payment gateway architecture needs to deliver 99.999% uptime. Downtime equals lost revenue that easily scales and hits your bottom line hard if not managed and mitigated. You want a system that’s accurate, transparent, and incredibly reliable. This not only ensures your data is accurate and consistent, but it also guarantees reliable data for audits, returns, disputes, and more.
Fraud and theft are always risks that you need to consider, so your payment gateway must be capable of providing peace of mind for both you and your customers. This means complying with regulations and protecting sensitive data so your business reputation remains intact.
Global fraud losses continue to grow, with Statista projecting these could surpass $38.5 billion by 2027. This underscores the need for robust payment gateway security architecture that can adapt to evolving threats.
You need an actual payment gateway. This isn’t as easy as it sounds because you need to figure out if you’re going to build your own or if you’re going to use one that’s already been developed by someone else. Considering how many regulations and expectations it has to meet, building your own can be intimidating – you need to create your custom payment gateway infrastructure, choose a payment platform, develop a customer relationship management system, embed security, get the right certifications, and smooth over all the bumps, by yourself.
If you don’t want to create your own payment gateway architecture and invest in the technology and spend on the complexity, you can use an already established solution that’s easy to implement, scalable, and significantly more cost-effective.
A trusted and reliable payment system architecture is invaluable. It provides you with instant payment processing that delights your customers and improves retention while adding layers of critical security, mitigating risks, and ensuring consistent uptime and service delivery.
Choosing a payment system design and architecture means you need to tick every one of the following boxes:
If you want an agile, scalable, smart, flexible, and efficient payment gateway architecture that can evolve with your business, then Unipaas has what it takes.
Unipaas is designed to support payment platforms with the tools they need to scale without draining resources. Leveraging the latest AWS cloud technologies and Kubernetes, Unipaas ensures scalability, compliance, and resilience in every transaction.
Unipaas enables you to create an exceptional payments experience that delivers exactly what your customers want and need, providing immediate access to a robust solution that fits seamlessly within your environment. Unipaas offers:
Creating a custom payment gateway is complicated and expensive. As outlined above, you will carry the burden of compliance and regulatory expectations alongside the costs of the technology, security, troubleshooting, data management and storage, and much more.
If you use an existing embedded payment platform architecture, such as the one from Unipaas, you bypass these complexities and the ongoing challenges of maintenance, admin, and management in favour of a consistently evolving system capable of meeting your needs. Using our marketplace payment platform, you gain real-time control, a comprehensive view of your payment operations within one centralised dashboard, and access to a flexible architecture that allows you to rapidly implement new services as required.
This level of scale and capability means that you gain immense strategic value without immense business costs, and you can enjoy all the benefits of a reliable and trusted payment gateway technical architecture without carrying the admin burdens.
The main components include the payment interface, encryption layer, transaction processor, acquiring bank connection, fraud prevention systems, and settlement mechanisms. Together, they form the foundation of a secure and reliable architecture.
Payment gateways use encryption, tokenisation, PCI DSS compliance, and layered fraud detection to ensure that sensitive payment data remains secure throughout the transaction process.
Yes. Modern architectures are designed to support cards, bank transfers, digital wallets, and alternative payments, giving customers the flexibility to pay however they prefer.
APIs connect your platform to the gateway’s services, enabling seamless integration, customised checkout experiences, and faster deployment of new features without needing to rebuild the entire infrastructure.
Fraud prevention relies on advanced security measures such as AI-driven anomaly detection, device fingerprinting, real-time risk scoring, and multi-factor authentication to block suspicious transactions before they’re processed.
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